I don't pretend to say
or know what it is that brings these two persons together;--and when I
say together, I only mean that there is an evident affinity of some kind
or other which makes their commonest intercourse strangely significant,
as that each seems to understand a look or a word of the other. When the
young girl laid her hand on the Little Gentleman's arm,--which so greatly
shocked the Model, you may remember,--I saw that she had learned the
lion-tamer's secret. She masters him, and yet I can see she has a kind
of awe of him, as the man who goes into the cage has of the monster that
he makes a baby of.
One of two things must happen. The first is love, downright love, on the
part of this young girl, for the poor little misshapen man. You may
laugh, if you like. But women are apt to love the men who they think
have the largest capacity of loving;--and who can love like one that has
thirsted all his life long for the smile of youth and beauty, and seen it
fly his presence as the wave ebbed from the parched lips of him whose
fabled punishment is the perpetual type of human longing and
disappointment? What would become of him, if this fresh soul should
stoop upon him in her first young passion, as the flamingo drops out of
the sky upon some lonely and dark lagoon in the marshes of Cagliari, with
a flutter of scarlet feathers and a kindling of strange fires in the
shadowy waters that hold her burning image?
--Marry her, of course?--Why, no, not of course.
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